Stuff You Should Know - The Ins and Outs of Beekeeping

Episode Date: October 10, 2019

Who wants fresh honey? We do! Learn all about the ancient art of beekeeping today. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart radios, How Stuff Works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, there's Jerry over there.

And this is Stuff You Should Know, the mellow gold edition. We talking about Beck? Yeah, sure, but I think Beck was really talking about AM soft rock from the 70s, which I gotta say is like right up my alley these days. I know. Love that.

I mean, I've always loved it, but I'm really on a streak right now. Yeah, you were championing the yacht rock thing. Yeah, I discovered Kenny Loggins, like I knew Kenny Loggins only from the Top Gun era. Oh, wow. And then that one Caddy Shack song, which I was not crazy about,

but then even further back before the Caddy Shack thing, it was just beautiful stuff. Yeah, Loggins of Messina. Yeah, I don't know if I've heard any Messina stuff, so I think I'm catching them right after the Messina part right before the Caddy Shack part. Okay, that's a pretty narrow Kenny Loggins window. That's niche right there.

But anyway, I'm talking about mellow gold, because I think you and I can both agree, Chuck, that even just reading about beekeeping, let alone actually engaging in the act of beekeeping, is about the most mellow just relaxing thing that you can possibly do on this planet. I think it's just above bird watching and birding because birds don't sting you.

Okay, so it's less mellow than bird watching? No, no, no. Yeah, it's less mellow. I think bird watching is the most mellow thing on the planet. Okay. And I think because there's a threat of stinging, then bees have to be just slightly more stressful. Yeah, we should probably just go ahead

and cut to that particular chase. Like if you are a beekeeper, you're going to get stinging. Like the bees don't necessarily know you exist and they certainly don't learn to love you or anything like that. There's just certain tricks and techniques you can do to vastly cut down on the chance you're going to be stung.

But you're going to be stung, like from what I've seen several dozen times a year, from working very closely with bees, handling them, interacting with them. And so if you have a bee allergy, you probably don't want to take up beekeeping. But don't turn this episode off because as we were just saying,

even just reading or hearing about beekeeping is relaxing. Yeah, and it's a great thing to do for the environment now because bees are super important to the environment. And they're dying off cause people spray for mosquitoes and use herbicides and things like that in their yard. And that's not cool. No, but it's not just that. Remember there's the colony claps disorder episode

that we did. No one ever got to the bottom of what has been the cause of this. There's like so many different culprits from like round up to pesticides to cell phone towers was a culprit there for a little while or suspected culprit. But as far as we know, as far as I know,

we don't know exactly what it is that's leading to colony claps disorder. So yeah, it is a good thing to say, you know what, I'm going to oversee a colony of bees and make sure that they are just in hog heaven as far as their little lifespans are concerned. That's right. And we did a full episode on bees in January, 2013.

What else did we do on bees? We did a TV show episode on bees and I sent you a clip from that episode today. And we both had a good laugh. I thought it was good. I was like, this is actually pretty good compared to how I remember it. Yeah.

Oh wow, I thought it was so bad. Really, that's funny. That's how I used to feel about it. Like I couldn't watch 10 seconds strung together of that show. It was so cringy to me. And I guess enough time has passed where now I look back on,

I'm like, this is actually not nearly as bad as I remember it being. The nostalgia has kicked in. It's the Shana Na effect. I guess so. That's funny you say Shana Na because I was just listening to Shana Na yesterday. See?

Yeah, it's that Bader Meinhof effect. That's what's going down. Which is even more astounding because I was listening to Bader Meinhof this morning. So beekeeping in the United States is becoming more and more popular these days. Here's a stat. And this was, this is an article

from the Old House of Works website. But it's from Dave Ruse. From Dave Ruse from Arvaryon. And that's how I found it because I'm looking for Ruse specific material now. It's just bonafide good stuff. It is, but he had a stat here from 2017 where there were about 2.67 million honeybee colonies

in the US. Mm-hmm. And of course, a lot of these are from, you know, from big bee, big honey. Right. But there's a lot of backyard beekeepers doing their best work and going out there with their mellow gold, smoking up those hives

and getting out that sweet, sweet nectar. Yeah, and actually those are good people to buy it from if you believe in immunotherapy like I do, which apparently is still considered unproven hoodoo, but it makes so much sense that you could introduce small amounts of like local pollen that you may develop an allergy to to prevent from getting allergies,

which means that you wanna buy honey that's been produced within 10, 20 miles, maybe of where you live. Yeah. So you would want to go find one of those small beekeepers who sells their honey. Yeah, if you're on your Facebook neighborhood page or your next door neighborhood page,

chances are you will see someone pop up every now and then that says, I've got honey or eggs or something like that or goat's milk, just go get that stuff and eat it up. Right, who wants goat's milk? Who wants goat's milk? You know, the traditional Facebook post creed. That's right. You could also go to like say,

like a street festival in your town or something like that, like a little community festival. You're probably going to find local honey there or a health food store, something like that. Or goat's milk, you know? Yeah, and while beekeeping is for sure fun and this made me wanna do it and it may do it one day.

Me too, but. You gotta have some time. It is not the easiest thing in the world to do. It kind of came across to me as one of those things that like a lot of stuff like this, your first batch may not be the best, but like you learn and you learn and you get better and better at it.

Yeah, and I wanna shout out too, also to some of the great resources in addition to this How Stuff Works article. I actually called a guy from Honey Harvest Farms in Glendon, Maryland, his name is Jeff. And Jeff helped me out with some info that I just couldn't find online. But some of the sites I came across

include Carolina Honeybees, Iron Oak Farm and Scientific Beekeeping. And all three of those are great resources, but there's a lot of really good resources on the internet to help explain how to do this and answer more like arcane questions. There's tons of forums, like people who are really into beekeeping I found

are called Beaks, Bee Geeks for short. And they are definitely into this. So there's tons of resources out there to kind of get started and just kind of dive in. But yeah, I got the impression that like there's always more to learn and each colony over the years is probably has its own personality,

I guess is how you'd put it. Yeah, should we go back in time though and talk about the history? I think so. Because they found honey that is 5,500 years old. Where? In Georgia, not our Georgia. Oh, the other Georgia.

Yeah, and honey is very famous for not going bad. They say if you find old honey like that, you can just heat it up and it will go back to being just delicious honey, even if it's crystallized. Right, because yeah, the crystallization is just kind of an unavoidable consequence of aging, but it's easy to reverse, right?

Just with a little bit of heat. Yeah, and you've got honey again flowing. Right, so did they taste that honey? I'm not sure if they tasted that honey, but they found other old honey that they've tasted and it's supposed to be pretty good. You know, it's honey, it tasted like honey, I think. Right, and it does, it stores, right, tastes like chicken.

And it stores forever, like literally from what we understand because it's sterile and it stays generally sterile. But the earliest depiction of actually rating a beehive or a beekeeping is not really beekeeping, it's basically just a picture of a guy in a cave in Spain on the cave walls, sticking his hand into a beehive. And it's from something like,

I believe 11,000 years ago. Yeah, 9,000 BCE, and yeah, sticking his hand in that honeypot. As far as real beekeeping goes and on a domesticated level, we all know that they did it in Egypt in about 2,500 BCE, but of course, people think China probably beat us, or not us, on the Egyptian. Chuck Kess is a lot with Egypt, everybody.

They beat us to it, here in Egypt. So in Egypt though, eventually, they have something like in hieroglyph, they have like beehives, clearly depicted, honeypots. And then they've also found hives that were human built, clearly human built, made of clay and straw from as late as 2,900 years ago in Israel. So we've been into honey for a very long time.

And at some point we figured out that you could probably suffer a lot fewer bee stings if you kind of, oh, what's the word? Insinuated yourself into this bee colony. And that's ultimately what beekeeping is, we'll see it's human saying, okay, I kind of get this life cycle of the bees and the bee colony and what's going on here.

I'm going to kind of manipulate this or oversee it, supervise, I guess is how you put it, this natural process in order to basically steal the honey from the bees at the end of the summer. That's right, in a way where they can keep making honey because in the early days, the very first beehives that people domesticated were hollowed out stumps and tree logs and things and they would destroy these,

they would get that honey and then be like, all right, let's just destroy it and kill everything that gave us this delicious honey. There was a better way forward later, but it also took the SKEP, SKEP, if you've ever seen what looks like a turned over basket with a hole in the bottom as sort of the symbol of beekeeping, that's called a SKEP.

And they still use them today here and there, I think like the most hardcore, old school, naturalist beekeepers might use a SKEP. Read hipster. Yeah, hipsters use SKEPs. Or they outside the developing world, we rarely use them these days, but they're still around and you can find pictures of them.

And if you look at images online and they have pictures of them turned over and you can see the comb stuffed in there, it's kind of cool looking. Right, yeah, yeah. And like you said, it's basically like the international kind of home spun symbol of beekeeping and honey raising. That's right, but that was not any better for the bee

because you had to destroy the hive with those as well. Right, which is, it's bad for the bees, but it's also bad for the beekeeper because you have to reestablish a new colony every time you harvest and you can keep a colony going for a lot longer than just one year, you know? Yeah, and things really kind of took a leap forward in Switzerland in the 18th century

with a man named Francois Huber, who had the first movable hive, the leaf hive, which was sort of like a book, it turned like a book would. And this was a good design because you could get the honey and not the brood and you can remove these leaves without killing the colony, which was a great step forward, but it still wasn't like the best design yet

and that one never really caught on. It didn't catch on, despite Huber's efforts to promote it, he would go into town and say, oh, well, let's see what's on the next page. Bees, what's on the next page? More bees, everyone, and town folk just never really caught on. No. But in the 19th century, there's a guy named Thomas Wildman

and he started working with what are called bar hives, which I have also seen called Kenyan bar hives. So I suspect that Thomas Wildman got the idea from Kenya, but it's like basically a long trough or like those standing planters that you can keep a number of plants in, but it's just basically like a long rectangular raised box. Sure.

It's like one of those, but then if you lift the top of the box, there's just a bunch of bars that stretch across the top inside and that's it. They have like a notch hanging down, but if you pull that bar up, you see that the bees have created combs dangling from those bars,

which is this bar hive is still very much in use today. It's just not nearly as widespread as the one we're about to talk about. Yes, there would be a man from Pennsylvania, a minister named Lorenzo Langstroth, who said, I will one day be the father of American beekeeping and everyone was like, what are you talking about? And he said, just pay attention,

because I have discovered what's called the bee space and everyone was like, what are you talking about? Is this a sermon? He was widely questioned. Like everything he said, he'd be like, I have to go to the bathroom. People would be like, what are you talking about? What's wrong with you, Langstroth?

So what he discovered is there's this magic space called the bee space where bees can really do their thing successfully. And he found out that bees would not even build a comb in a space tighter than one centimeter. Right. And so he said, this is the bee space where they can produce the comb in the right amount

and not enough bee glue is gonna get in the way. Like this is the magic area and I shall declare it bee space and it shall be fruitful. Yeah, and it was like, believe it or not, realizing that bees don't build comb or glue in anything tighter than a centimeter, revolutionized beekeeping.

Because now with that bee space, you could build these beehives so that on the edges of them, they were just a centimeter between the sides of say where the combs were built. You could keep these frames or these bars separated by a centimeter. So there's enough space like you were saying

for the bees to work, but not enough for them to glue together, which was an ongoing, apparently millennia old problem of having to harvest and getting a bunch of combs stuck together at once. With this space, now all of a sudden you had little bits of comb that you could manipulate a lot more easily. And that was like a huge contribution

to beekeeping strangely enough. That's right. And he got the first American patent on a movable frame beehive in October of 1852, hooked up with a cabinet maker from Philadelphia, named Henry Borkwin and started building these things, started selling them and did okay, but he found out that his patent was way too hard to enforce.

He tried to for a little while, but it was basically a waste of his time. And the patent was just walked all over and he ended up getting no royalties, but did revolutionize beekeeping. So a Langstroth hive then is a proprietary eponym. Is that what you're saying? Well, I mean, he got the patent.

Right. And he couldn't enforce it. So it just became like Kleenex. Sort of. Or aspirin. Yeah. I mean, if you, if you buy a Langstroth hive today, then for sure he's not getting any dough because he's long dead. Long dead in the ground.

But so this hive, this is really cool. And we'll talk more about it later, but just put a pin in it that this is the most widespread hive. Like Langstroth figured out how to make a beehive that is so close to ideal that since the 1850s, that it's gone virtually unimproved. Just pretty, pretty significant accomplishment, if you ask me.

Yeah. And I looked at these war or were hives, W-A-R-R-E, which is another kind. But I didn't, I mean, I'm sure there are differences once you dig in there, but it didn't look that much different to me than the Langstroth. Yeah. I couldn't really tell much of the, I mean, I saw, oh, well this, the Langstroth doesn't have this quilted thing

of like, you know, cardboard shavings or whatever. So there's like, I think it's the very small differences that make a big difference in differentiating between these hives. Yeah. So should we take a break? I think we should. And then Chuck, when we come back,

we're going to talk a little bit about bee society. Okay. Let's do it. In the doorstep in theorganicится.com Bше h Republic В. On the podcast, may dude The Nineties, called David Lashor and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show.

Hey, Dude bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces, We're going to use, hey, Dude, as our jumping off point. But we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the nineties. I lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews,

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and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s.

Listen to, Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing.

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on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right, so I would direct everyone to our 10 of 10 TV show, Stuff You Should Know. Or in particular, the Bee's episode, which by the way, I wrote, I have an executive producer credit on that show from writing that episode.

And that's why you have an executive producer credit on every episode. That's true. And that really earned it on that one. Writing it. Well, listen, so that's funny because that's how it was explained to me at the time. But Chuck, I just wanna go on record here.

I went to Herculean links to keep you from getting stung by a bee in that episode. And they said, absolutely not, Chuck, has to get stung. Just to make the episode worth watching, he has to get stung. And I thought it was a better idea if you didn't, if we kept building up to it and it never happened. But they said, no, no, we're not going with that.

But I tried really hard to keep you from getting stung. That's right. And we had little fake bees that they put on my eyeball. But I would direct people to the January 26th podcast episode instead. Why not both? Sure, but if you really wanna learn about bees, that's where we dive into it super deep.

So I guess we'll just consider this a bit of a recap. Okay. Okay, so in the world, there's something like 20,000 species of wild bees. But in honey bee or beekeeping, you're going to find usually one species of bee, apis mellifera, which is either the European or the Western honey bee.

And there's different varieties. They call them races, you know, with like breeds of dogs, we call them breeds, but they're all still the same species, heinous lupus, but with bees, they're all the same species, apis mellifera, but the races are different. So you have like the Italian honey bee or the Carnolean, I believe Carnolean honey bee

or the Russian honey bee, but they're all races of European or Western honey bee. That's what you're gonna find everywhere. Yeah, and these things are amazing. I remember at the time, we were just sort of obsessed with bees after that episode, so much so that we wanted to do it for the TV show. And one of the main reasons is because they're what's called

a super organism, which basically means you take a Western honey bee out on its own and that thing isn't gonna do anything worthwhile with its life. It couldn't order dinner at Roy Rogers' restaurant, it's so dumb. No, but when you put all these things together, all these bees have very specific jobs

that we're gonna go over here in a second. And all these coordinated actions, and that is the super organism. They are one whole, like 60,000 honey bees acting as one in order to produce honey. Hive mind, it's that hive mind, right? I mean, we get so many hive mind, worker bees, all these like things that are in like our lexicon

are all taken from the way bees do their thing. Right, exactly. And so when you put them together, this larger super organism, an emergent property of the collective actions and the instincts that these bees are following. If you put it all together, they interact and form this larger whole,

and that's the colony. And so on the individual level, you have three different types of bees. You've got worker bees, which make up the vast majority of the population. They're all female, they're all sexually undeveloped females. That's right.

And they do almost all of the work as usual around the hive. That includes everything from raising the eggs to creating wax. What else do they do? They make the honey, they go collect the pollen, they defend the hive, they serve as guards at the entrance,

like they do almost everything. Yeah, they take care of that queen, which is the biggest one of all. Literally. So this all made me nervous when I was reading this again, because so much depends on the queen. It all depends on this one bee.

Wait, it made you nervous? Yeah, it's not, because it's not like, oh, there's a bunch of queens. So if one of them dies or something happens, then you're fine. No. You gotta have that queen,

and there's just one of them. I can't remember where we heard it, but like somebody said somewhere that like the queen is their slave. And that's actually like kind of true because the queen's whole job, Chuck, is to basically keep the colony going and optimistic through this pheromone

that she creates, but also to like lay all of the eggs and fertilize them. But that's a lot of eggs. It's a ton, like apparently a queen can lay up to a million in her lifetime, right? Yeah, and that's over a few years,

but that's about 1500 eggs a day. But my point is this, the queen is their slave, because she does this for them, she keeps the population going, but they decide when it's time for another queen to be born, as far as I know.

Sure. Is that correct? I think so. Okay. We'll find out in the listener mail. Then you got your drones, of course. Those are the male bees, and it is funny,

you have one queen, you have these males that all they do is mate with the queen, and then these female worker bees do literally everything else. Right. But on the other end, the female worker bees

are the ones who get to decide like who lives and who dies. Sure. And if you're a male drone, once you've mated with the queen, which happens in midair outside of the hive. It's very sexy. It is super sexy.

The queen mates with multiple males at once, gathers their sperm and stores it in a little sack, which she then goes and lays eggs and fertilizes the eggs as she sees fit. Because I believe unfertilized eggs are drones, and fertilized eggs are workers. So the queen is actually keeping an eye on how many of what are needed.

But the drones, once they mate, especially when it comes time for winter, and all of a sudden they're starting to hit up their food stores and things are getting scarce, the drones get pushed out into the cold to go off and die by themselves. That's right.

That's a pretty ignomious end. Yeah. And you know, it's a good time to point out that at different times of the year, bees are gonna be more well fed naturally. And as you'll see, when you're beekeeping, you have to keep track of what time of year it is, because like you said in the winter,

it's gonna be super scarce. But even in the fall and early spring, you're gonna need to supplement their food intake. Right, exactly. Because here's the thing. So just with this life cycle of bees, in the spring when the flowers start to bloom and the bees are going crazy,

it's what's called the nectar flow, they are producing honey over time. And so what you're doing is the beekeepers are saying, oh, okay, well here, I wanna make sure you have plenty of room to store as much honey as you possibly can, because what the bees are doing is storing honey, literally storing energy away

to help get them through the winter. And you're going in and saying, I'm gonna take these honey stores that you plan to use to make it through the winter, and I'll leave you some. I'll leave you hopefully just enough so that you don't need any. But I'll also, as the beekeeper,

this human who's insinuating himself or herself, I'll hit you up with some food too, to make sure you guys survive happy and comfortably through this winter, in exchange for letting me take this honey. Right, because I've got some toast inside that's just popped out of the toaster. Man, I had some creamed honey for the first time today.

Oh yeah? I mean, like I'm a big time honey guy, but I had not had creamed honey before, and it's great. Is that like spun honey or is that different? It is a combination of crystallized and liquid honey that's highly spreadable. Okay.

And I got it, it's like just Trader Joe's stuff. Who knows where it was made, but it's very tasty at least. He's doing nothing for my immune system, but it's doing a lot for my limbic system. Yeah, I mean, honey's sort of one of nature's miracles. It is. When you start talking about manuka honey

and things that have like these healing properties, and it's pretty great. Stung by jellyfish, put some honey on it. Oh yeah? No. Oh, I bet it couldn't hurt. No, at the very least you can eat some while you're doing that,

and it makes things a little better. So, should we talk about equipment for a bit? Yeah, I think so. So, because this is about beekeeping. That was our brief bee overview, but again, go back to January, 2013, if you want the full scoop on bees. But this is about beekeeping,

and if you want to be a beekeeper, we also did a little short on beekeeping. When? Well, one of our little shorts that we used to, like for the car commercials, when we would go around to different locations, we did a little beekeeping bit, because I remember we had smokers,

and we wore the hat and veil. I remember that too. And gloves. I just had forgotten what the context was for, but yeah, it was for one of those shorts. I can't remember what we call them. Interstitials. That's right.

The most dry scientific clinical name for those things. Those were good, surely you like those, right? Yeah, I think those hold up, those are fun. Okay, good. So here's what you're gonna need is new equipment. If you're new to beekeeping, Dave here recommends you get new equipment. Oh yeah, no, you have to.

Because if you get inherited equipment, like once you're on the scene, somebody might be like, hey, I got an extra smoker, or here's some frames I can't use. They open their trench coat, and they've got a bunch of bee boxes hanging inside. What do you have? What do you want?

But as you will find out later on in our section on disease and bacteria and stuff, it's pretty prevalent. So you wanna get your new equipment going if you're new to beekeeping, just so you start out on the right foot. Yeah, because once a specific kind of bacteria that causes foul brood,

once it's in your boxes, like your colony is toasting, your boxes are done forever. You need to burn the boxes so they don't end up in somebody's hands because it'll just stay and linger and kill everybody. So that's not good. So as we kind of said earlier,

far and away the most popular hive among beekeepers is the Langstroth hive, right? So we're gonna just kind of focus on that one, but it is a lot of fun to just go look at exploded diagrams of the different kinds of bee hives out there that beekeepers use and see all the different parts or whatever, but there's too many of them to really go into.

So we're just gonna focus on the Langstroth hive, even though with just the length of this introduction to how we're just going to pay attention to the Langstroth hive, I could have covered two or three other hives, but we're gonna stick to just the Langstroth hive, okay? So you could build one of these things if you were good at this kind of thing,

but what I recommend is that you go online or you go to, if there happens to be a local apiary store in your village, go buy one there. If you live in a village, there's an apiary store for sure. But yes, they also sell mustache wax and beard oils. Handmade axes. Handmade axes. So yeah, but it is true.

Like if you have like a quaint hardware store, that's probably a good place to look. And then also, I guarantee there's a million places online to get them to, and they're relatively cheap too. Yeah, not too much. You can get into bees for, you know, it seems like including the bees for less than 500 bucks, you can kind of get going, right?

That's what I'm getting. And probably if you really, you know, watch what you're doing, maybe half of that. Yeah. All right, so you get your Langstroth hive and this thing has a big box on the lower half called the hive body or the brood chamber. And this is where the bees are mainly.

Yeah, and even below that, you have a stand that the thing's sitting on. Sure. It raises it off of the ground and usually it's kind of angled. So it's like a landing pad for the bees. And then it also improves circulation. Then you have the bottom board,

which is the floor of the hive, which protects the hive from invaders from above. And then you've got the brood chamber above that, the hive body. That's right. And that's where they're gonna be building that comb. That's where the queen's gonna be laying her eggs. Yep.

That's where they're gonna raise that brood up and that's where they're gonna store the honey that they think that they're gonna be eating in abundance. Right, and then you've got a really important piece of equipment that would be very easy to overlook if you don't know what you're doing, but you're gonna have issues if you don't get it. It's called a queen excluder.

So you remember Chuck that you said that the queen is about twice the size of the workers? I don't know if I said that, but that is true. You definitely did. I'm here to tell you. When you add a queen excluder, all it is is basically like a mesh or slats or something like that,

that are spaced far enough apart for the workers to easily make it through, but it's too close together for the queen to make it through. So the queen won't leave the brood chamber to lay eggs. She'll just use the brood chamber for that, which means though that the workers can go lay honey in the chamber above the brood chamber, which is called the honey super, the box above that.

That's right, the honey super, not the supper. No, just the super. And I didn't see why they call it that, did you? No. The honey superposition maybe? I don't know. It's a nod to quantum physics? Maybe so, but this is where they're gonna store

that surplus honey when the plants are blooming and that nectar is flowing and you're skimming some off the top as the beekeeper. Yeah, and like if you did not have that queen excluder, the honey super would be just another brood chamber because the queen wants to use as many places as she can to lay eggs and then they lay honey around it. So the eggs, which also serves as the nursery for the brood

and the honey, they're all like together in the same combs, but because you put that queen excluder, she's not laying eggs in that honey super, which means it's just sweet, delicious honey in all of the combs on the frames, which we haven't talked about yet. Well, yeah, these are the frames. These are the frames that you can take in and out.

They hang vertically. And these days, it's pretty amazing how far they've come. They are actually pre-printed with beeswax or some sort of foundation made of plastic that just sort of says, here you go bees, here's a little head start. All right. But you found some extra interesting stuff

about the bees and their wax-making abilities too. Yeah, I did actually. So like it takes about a tablespoon of honey to make an ounce of wax. And bees make wax through a gland, right? They eat the honey and secrete wax instead. And so whenever they create a new brood chamber, they make it, they secrete it as wax and basically a circle

and then they use their body heat to shape it into a hexagon. And the reason they- Kind of a perfect little hexagon too. Right, and the reason that they make hexagons is because they don't know this, but structurally it is the most structurally sound shape in nature that uses the least amount of material.

Right. Which is just astounding that bees instinctually know to make a hexagon. A hexagon, right? Not octagon. A hexagon. Right. Yeah, five sides.

But they use, but they start with a circle and then use their body heat to melt it into the shape. Well, anyway, they have to do this for each egg that they put in a brood chamber. They have to do this for each cell that they put honey into and then they also make wax to cap the honey off. So it requires a lot of honey to make that wax, which means logically, if you can give them a leg up

either with pre-printed honey or plastic or leaving as much honey as you can from the honey harvest, or leaving as much wax there as you can after the honey harvest, they don't have to make new wax. They can reuse the old stuff, which means that's less honey that your bees are eating to produce wax, which means it's more honey that you're getting.

Yes. And by the way, if you're typing an email to me right now because I said hexagons are five-sided, please stop. It is six sides to a hexagon. Do you think you can accept agons? Yes. Everyone knows that a five-sided structure is a circle. Wait, what is a five-sided one?

Huh? What's a five-sided one? Is that a pentagon? Or is it pentagon? Yeah, you're right, pentagon. I played enough Dungeons and Dragons as a youth that I should know this, but I don't remember. I get my gons confused sometimes, everyone.

Well, Chuck, I'll teach you a little cheat here. Okay. Just refer to all of them as polygons in your cupboard. Oh, really? Oh, yeah. So like every hexagon, it's a polygon, that kind of thing. Hexagon, triangle, anything with three sides or more, it's a polygon and ask someone, no, not a polygon.

That's a circle, but ask someone to debate you and they can't. You'll just shut them down every time. Yeah, and also make new friends at parties. Right. Come at me, fight me. Polygon. So you're also gonna have a feeder in this thing. We talked a little bit earlier about the fact

that you're skimming this honey and taking some for yourself as it's made in excess. And at other times of the year, when it's especially late summer and winter, their pollen resources are gonna be lower, obviously, because things aren't in full bloom. So you're gonna have to help feed these little fellas and little ladies.

There are feeders. Dave here says something about a Ziploc bag with sugar water with a slit cut, but I've seen that's the most rudimentary thing I can imagine. One small step up is like sort of an aluminum pan with sugar water that slides in and out of this box. Yeah, and you know those like pet feeders,

those pet waters that have like the water up in it. Some of them look like that. Yeah, so that's specifically called a boardman feeder. And it's just a mason jar filled with sugar water and screwed into the mason jar cap, which is inverted in a little wooden thing with some slots for the bees to get in and out of. And the cap is perforated,

so the sugar water just slowly drips out. And so it's a long, steady supply of water that you slide the wood part that the cap is inserted upside down into into the front entrance of your beehive. So all you have to do is unscrew the mason jar and put more sugar water in every once in a while and the bees need it.

It's a really easy way to feed bees. That's right. But specifically you mentioned pollen. I saw something that I didn't realize, but when you reach about the fall, you don't want the bees to have any pollen. If you're feeding them, it has to be like pure sugar water

because if they eat pollen, that will produce solid waste and bees are really clean and they won't go in their hive. They leave the hive to go evacuate their bowels, which actually ties into that yellow rain short stuff we did, remember that? That's right. But they'll go fly away from the hive,

but if it's too cold, they can't leave the hive. So they will actually die rather than poop in the colony, or some of them will be like, forget it, I'm living, I'm just gonna go ahead and poop. But now the whole colony is spoiled and the reason why is because they've eaten too much pollen and they can't make it until the spring to go outside and poop.

So you don't want to feed them any pollen in the fall. That's right. And that is the opposite of our wives who would rather die than poop in a public place. Right, exactly. Me too, I basically would as well. Oh, I'll poop anywhere. I know man, it's an admirable quality.

I mean, I don't love it, but I certainly won't put myself at risk. What's your technique to go to like a happy place and just pretend you're not there, like you just leave your body for a little while? No, I just go kind of primal, you know? Oh yeah, like a lot of grunting and kicking at the walls? No, just, you know, it's like, you got to do it.

It's the most primal thing you can do. Sure. Just to force feces out of your body. Jerry's eating, I'm very sorry. I know, sorry Jerry, the Miso is just drooling out of the crack of her mouth. Oh, I'm not doing it, she is. So let's keep going here

because we need to move on to the tools because that's the box, that's a Langstroth hive. Get a good one, make sure it's solid. Yeah, and again, you don't have to break the bank. There's a cheap, basic Langstroth hive isn't going to put you in the poor house. And plus one other thing about Langstroth hive before we move on that's so ingenious Chuck

is it's modular and scalable. So you can easily like remove the top boxes and put another brood chamber on, put another honey super on, and you know, harvest more and more honey. If you break part of it, you can replace parts. Exactly, so yeah, it's like a really good invention. Like it makes sense that it would have been invented

in 1850 and not, you know, really have been changed that much. Yeah, agreed. So we talked a little bit about the protective clothing. That is that veil. You can have the cool little sort of safari pith helmet with a veil, but usually they will just fit over any kind

of wide brimmed hat. You want to make sure it's snug. They, some people, you know, it depends on who you are. If you're really used to this, you can build up sensitivity to bee stings and you're like, forget the gloves, forget covering my body. I'll just wear the veil.

Some people might not even wear the veil because they're so cool. I think at least they wear the veil. Oh no, I've seen people handling bees without veils my friend. For real? Sure, that's crazy. Yeah, you think old time beekeepers are putting on a veil?

All the videos I watched, everyone was wearing veils. Like they might not have been wearing anything else, but they had a veil and they had the second thing, a smoker. Well yeah, you got to have that smoker and that is a very cool device. And I'd always wanted to hold one.

And finally we got to when we made that little video interstitial. And it looks sort of like Dave compared it to a elongated metal teapot. Not a bad descriptor. It's just like a metal canister with a spout pointing upward. And it's got a handle that has a little bellows

built into it. And what you do is, and I always wonder what the heck was in there, you're just burning something. You're burning cardboard or you're burning leaves or something and use that bellows just to pump a little smoke out. Right, and the reason you're pumping the smoke out

is to calm the bees. And it calms the bees by masking the pheromones that they say the guard bees are shooting out. Which means that the other bees aren't picking up on this alarming pheromone. And so they're all remaining calm actually. So it's an essential tool of the trade is the smoker. That's right.

And you're also gonna need a hive tool. If you look those up it's, if you've ever used a Wonder Bar, I think that's probably proprietary name, but it's kind of like a flat crowbar. Right. That's exactly what it looks like. Instead of a beefy round crowbar.

I highly suggest you get a Wonder Bar too because those are just great to have around the house. Yeah, I have one of those. You got a Wonder Bar? I do, I don't know if it's Wonder Bar trademark pry bar, but it is exactly that, yeah. Yeah, so this hive tool is sort of the same. And it is used, I think I mentioned bee glue earlier on

that's propolis. And that is saliva and beeswax and other like materials from the garden maybe. And they use that to seal up gaps in the hive, but you're gonna need to pry open stuff, like get that bee glue loose and that hive tool is what you use, because it doesn't destroy your beautiful,

beautiful hive box. Yeah, because I mean, the frames are where they build these honeycombs and you need to get the frames out to get the honey from the honeycomb. So yeah, you're gonna need to pry the frames out sometimes. It's funny. Everything the bee's doing is saying,

please don't take my honey. Exactly. And we're like, oh, but we have a tool that allows us to do that. Right. And yeah, including enough to stinging you to say, please don't take my honey. But yeah, we don't listen.

Yeah. You wanna take our second break? Yeah, let's do it. Okay. We'll be right back. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude,

bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews,

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Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right, so if this whole thing has really floated your boat as it did us, because Chuck, I guarantee you, both of us are going to be country folk beekeepers by the time we're dead. Yeah, in our retirement.

Right, so if you've been bitten by the bug, the bee, if you've been stung by the beekeeping. That's all that coming. Bug, there's actually just a few things you want to do to get started. It's not hard to get into. It's one of those things like, have you ever taken scuba diving lessons?

Nope. You learn how to scuba dive and it takes about 30 minutes. And then the rest of like, say the week long course is to teach you how to stay alive as something goes wrong. All right. Beekeeping is kind of the same way. Like it's really easy to get into and learn the basics, but it takes years of just understanding

and learning and picking up new things to really become an advanced beekeeper. Yeah, and you can read books and you can go online and you can take courses, but like with everything, there's nothing like firsthand experience. And like you said, it's gonna be a while, be a while, I mean to do that. I'm sorry.

But in a couple of seasons, you're gonna really know what you're doing to a large degree. Yeah, Dave Roos says, man, go find a mentor. There's plenty of beekeepers out there who are, they're not gonna yell at you for asking. They'll probably be happy to pass along this knowledge and information.

I think so. It seems like a hobby slash job that people want to spread the love of. Right, like creamed honey. So Dave says though, just there's some basic things to start. You wanna pick a location for your hive. And one of the first things you wanna do is make sure that you're allowed to have a hive

depending on where you live. If you live out in the country, there's probably very few ordinances. Most ordinances either say you can't have bees here because this is a city and within the city limits, no bees are allowed. They say bees are farm animals, so they belong on a farm.

Or bees are non domesticated animals, so same thing. Or heaven forbid, you have an HOA, just forget about it. Yeah, literally forget about it if you have an HOA. There's one place called Champlain, Minnesota. And they say, at least as far as the University of Minnesota says that they allow bees so long as, quote, the neighbors are on board. That's the official law.

From what I understand, I don't know if that's in the city code or the county code, but that's how it was put on the University of Minnesota website. So that is a good point though. You wanna make sure your neighbors are cool with it. Or at the very least that you have enough land that your neighbors aren't gonna be bothered by the bees. Yeah, but if you have a neighbor that says,

I'm definitely allergic to bees, then I mean, tell them to move. Right, either that or it's time for you to get into like RC planes. That's right. So you get your local ordinances all settled. You pay off your neighbor. And then you want your, you wanna direct that bee traffic,

you know, like where you set it up on your property is important. You don't want to have the hive entrance and exit facing your neighbor's property. Right. You wanna have it facing your house. And you want it ideally facing south or southeast. Yeah, and the reason why you wanna have it facing

south or southeast is so it gets all sorts of really good morning sun because that'll wake the bees up and get them going and saying, get off your duffs, lazies, and get out there and start foraging and make me some honey. That's right. They also say it's goodbye if you have like some bushes

or a privet or a fence near the entrance because when they leave the hive, that's gonna make encourage them to go upwards. Yeah, rather than to your neighbor's pool. That's right. So you also, in addition to making sure the beehive gets morning sun, you wanna protect it from strong winds.

Yeah. You wanna make sure that it's definitely protected from afternoon, the worst of the afternoon sun, so to say like between two and four, you don't want unobstructed sun just beating down your beehive, it's gonna cook them. And you also wanna make sure that there's a good, all weather cap on the beehive

that's gonna protect it from rain and stuff like that too. And speaking of rain, you also want a water source nearby. Yeah, I mean, you made a joke about going to your neighbor's pool, but that could happen because bees need water. They forage for water and they cool the hive with it. They blend it with pollen to make bee bread,

which is pollen, nectar, and honey, and that's what they eat. And I think that's what the larvae especially feed on. Is that right? Yeah, I think so. Okay. That bee bread. So if you live near a pond or you gotta like grow up like me

and had a creek nearby your house and then you're all set, you don't need to worry about it. But if you don't, then you're gonna wanna put something in like a bird bath might be nice. Or Dave even says you can just put a large platter of water. Yeah, Dave also says put a Ziploc of sugar water on your beehive and cut a slit in it. So maybe go a step further beyond a platter.

Well, I mean, it depends on your aesthetic, I think. I guess. But you gotta give them water. Put some water in like a tire that stood up on its side. I love that, just do that in your yard. Why are you picking on Dave? He's the best. Because that was some just genuinely bad advice.

Don't put a platter of water out there. Like put a little more thought into this. Okay. All right, so you've got everything except bees. And it had never occurred to me where you get these bees, you know? I thought you just set this all up and the bees would be attracted to it

and fill it up over the course of a decade. And then you can start making honey. You can actually buy bees. Yeah, and they arrive via postal service, from what I understand, or probably FedEx these days, but I read a Mother Earth News article from 1974 and they were saying, your postman will love you for this, but they're going to arrive in a package,

a box filled with live bees, probably somewhere around 10,000 of them. Yeah, and a mated queen, that's important. It's not like you have all this and you're like, now I gotta go find the rarest thing in the world, which is a happily mated queen. Right, and so the mated, this is one of the reasons I called Jeff over at the farm,

at Honey Harvest Farm in Glinda, Maryland, because I was like, well, I couldn't find what mated specifically meant. It was called pre-mated. That's what Dave, Dave called it, pre-mated. So I was like, does that mean a virgin queen that hasn't mated yet, or has mated beforehand? That's what it sounds like to me, right?

Yeah, yeah, the latter is correct. They have the queen mate with a bunch of drones and then they say, yoink and take the queen and sequester her so that she can't lay any eggs. And then they put her in a special container with the rest of the bees and ship them to you. And then you put the bees together in your own brood chamber with the queen

and her sequestered thing. And you peel back a little piece of tape or something. And that exposes a little candy plug and the workers eat through the candy plug to free the queen. It's pretty cool how that works. It really is. And I've also seen that the candy plug,

which is meant to also keep the queen bee alive during transport, if it comes out or something, you can just plug it with a marshmallow too, which is the most quaint thing I've ever read in my entire life. You should also try and get your bees locally. If you get them locally, then you know, A, that they haven't been shipped a long way,

which is gonna stress them out. And B, that they're gonna be hip to your scene. They're gonna be down with your weather and just cool with the bars and the restaurants that are nearby. They'll know all about the local schools that the parents never stopped talking about and everyone's just gonna be happier.

Right, so also, hopefully you can just go pick them up, but I do have the impression that there's tons of mail order bees too. Oh, sure. But you whenever it is, you wanna order them so that they arrive in early, early spring because your whole goal here is to get this colony up and moving and really healthy

and well populated and rare to go by the time the spring flowering and the nectar flow begins. That's right. There's another way to do this, what I call the Chuckway, the Chuck version. Sure. And that's to buy a nuke.

Right. And a nuke is a nucleus colony. And that is just sort of like the lazy person's all-in-one solution. You buy a hive box, it's preloaded, it's stocked, it's got an active queen, it's got eggs, it's got your brood, it's got your pollen stores. It already has honey for God's sake.

Right. And they call it, like I said, a short for nucleus colony is a nuke and you can get a nuke for not much more than this other stuff. Right, yeah. And I mean, so basically it's the brood chamber component that we were talking about with the Langstroth hive.

That's basically what you're buying is they ship you a, like you say, a ready to go brood chamber and then you just start putting a queen excluder and super boxes and all that stuff on top. And there you go. It seems pretty smart to me to try starting with that as well.

When I was looking at the price, I was like, geez, what are these nukes? Like a thousand bucks. And it seems like it was all about $50 more than starting from scratch. But I think you can spend quite a bit on a starter kit of bees if you're say looking to have just purebred bees.

I like something specialized. Yeah, like just Italian honey bees or just Russian honey bees because they different races have different kind of tendencies like Italian honey bees tend to keep a larger population over the winter, which means that you need to leave them more honey

or feed them more, but they're also friendlier and more docile, all that kind of stuff. But it's really expensive because those bees are artificially inseminated and like really in a very controlled environment. Whereas with most of those ones that you're spending like a hundred or 200 bucks

on 10,000 of them, they're what they call mutts, which are just like a whole bunch of different races of the same species of bee. And they have a lot of different characteristics, some of which may actually make them less susceptible to diseases than say like purebreds are. It's like a normal person compared to British royalty or something.

Is that too soon? I don't think so. Okay. So once you've got everything set up, your main job is going to be to feed your bees, try and keep them from swarming and then making sure they stay healthy from disease and mites.

You're gonna be harvesting that excess honey along the way, like we've been talking about. And gonna be feeding them that sugar water to keep them happy. And as you're doing this, you're gonna be learning more and more about just sort of the shorthand of it all. Like when you go to even lift the back of a box,

you're gonna know just by weight, like how heavy with honey the thing is. You're not gonna have to keep pulling stuff out and looking at it over and over. That's pretty impressive. Yeah, all these little shortcuts. But we need to talk about swarming because that's a big deal

and something that seems like it could happen fairly easily. If you have a good, healthy hive going on and they're producing a lot of brood, it's gonna become overcrowded. So you want to, part of avoiding this is to keep your population in check. But if you don't, then they're going to swarm, which means half of your colony,

and sometimes all of it, is gonna say, come on, queen, let's go. Let's leave this place. I don't like this apartment anymore because it's too crowded. Right, which is just a unavoidable natural process. Because if you think about it, what the bees are doing is reproducing

and growing their population. And then eventually when things get crowded, they split into two and go establish a new colony or leave the old colony behind, right? So you're artificially preventing that from happening by doing things like inspecting the brood chamber for signs of queen cells, like little queen larva that are being grown

by the workers, which means that they're preparing to swarm and start another colony. Yeah, that looks like a little peanut sort of hanging off of your comb. And if you just go through and pick those off, literally pick, just get them out of there, then the bees are like,

oh, okay, I guess we're not going to raise another queen now. But there's other things you want to do too, like you want to actually physically get rid of some of the brood to control the population. You're just basically saying this idea about swarming, we're not going to do that. We're going to make it so that you have more room by controlling the population.

Yeah, when you say get rid of the brood, that doesn't mean take these frames out and burn them on the fire. You're going to be involved hopefully by this time with other local people in the area that are doing this. You're going to be going to beekeeper meetings and getting hammered once a month on mead. And you're going to trade with your friends.

You're going to say, hey, I got too much going on here. I'm afraid I'm going to get a swarm happening. So here's some brood frames if you can take them. And people are going to be very grateful for that. Yeah, because it's kind of like getting a free nuke to supplement your colony that's maybe not doing so good because there's two problems. One, your colony can be too healthy

and then it's going to swarm, which you want to prevent. Or it can be weak, which means that it can be overwhelmed by robber bees, nearby bees that come through and just steal a bunch of stuff and basically kill off the weak colony. So yeah, just to supplement your numbers with a brood frame that somebody doesn't want because their population's starting to swarm,

that would be a very good thing to have. That's right. One other thing about swarming, Chuck, that's how you make a bee beard. That's right. You take a queen and you tie her to your forehead and the bees will come and form a beard around your face. That's what they're doing with the bee beard.

It's pretty funny looking. And they will get stung, but the reason why they're not totally stung is because before they swarm, the bees gorge themselves on honey for their travel and to go establish the new colony and they're just following the queen. And so if the queen is tied to your forehead,

they're just hanging out waiting to see what she's going to do. Totally. All right, we need to talk about disease because it is bad right now. There's something called the Varroa mite, which is a parasitic pest and it is very small, came to the United States in the 1980s

and is the most common cause of bee death and colony failure right now because 42% of commercial bee hives, almost half in spring of 2017 were infected with Varroa. It's a bad, bad problem. It is because they will lay their eggs, these mites will lay their eggs on the larva or the pupa of the bees and they will feed on the pupa and either kill them or deform them.

They will also attach themselves to adult bees and suck their blood. They spread disease, it's a really bad jam. And so as being a beekeeper, you have to keep an eye out for any kind of mite infestation and then treat it accordingly. That's like a basic part of beekeeping, but also something that's a little more advanced

than anything we could really go into now. It's just know that part of beekeeping is monitoring for diseases and pests and then treating them. Yeah, you don't want more than 10 and there are various ways that you can test how many mites you have that once you get into beekeeping, you're going to learn all these little tricks.

But you don't want any more than 10 mites per 200 bees. And if you have more than that, then you're in trouble. And when you look at a picture of these things like sitting on a bee and feeding on it, it's just, you just want to like pry it off of there and squash it. Right, but then foul brood, which we mentioned earlier is another big problem

and it got its name from the sulfurous smell that a brood frame will have when you pull it out. And once you have that, your whole colony's gone. They're goners and you need to burn your wooden wire boxes. Yeah, I saw dead fish. I was, cause I saw sulfur and I was like, well, does it smell like farts?

Right. But then I saw dead fish was kind of what a lot of people said it smells like. And if you've got that, then I'm sorry, that's, what a let down. It is a let down, especially if it happens, you know, right around, you know, right before they really start producing honey.

Right, and that's where we find ourselves. Finally, you get to that sweet, sweet, mellow gold, which is what you're doing this for, and not only to get the honey, but obviously to also do the right thing by encouraging bee populations. But harvesting honey is what everyone's really in it for, whether you're gonna sell it or just give it away

to friends or just have some for your family. That's really the end game here. And so like when you do, when you go to get the honey, there's actually a pretty clever little thing you put on, in between the brood chamber and the honey super that you're gonna collect honey from that lets the bees out, but it produces a maze for them to try to get back in.

So after 24 to 48 hours, all the bees will clear out, and you can take your honey super and all of the frames laden with honey and put them into an extractor, which is definitely going to probably double the amount that you've put into your beekeeping so far. But from everything I've seen, is if you're going to harvest honey,

this is the way to do it. Did you see any videos on this? Yeah, I mean, you can get mechanical motorized ones. It's like a centrifuge, but the ones I saw were mainly a very home spun, just sort of these hand cranked versions. Literally home spun. Yeah, you uncap it and remove the wax.

And you'll see in these videos, they hold up the frames and just take a knife, like a hot knife and just sort of cut the wax away from the frame. And then you can literally see the honey there. If you don't have an extractor, you can just do it the old fashioned way and lay it down and just wait for the honey to flow.

But you can also stick them down in the extractor, the one I saw held about eight frames and you just crank that thing and it just slings the honey out and filters. You have to have certain size screens for a honey extraction to filter out the wax bits and bee legs and antennae or things, bee parts. Sure.

You want to get that stuff out of there too. Yeah, but then at the bottom is the catch where between the extractor and the screen is a reservoir and there's a spigot on the bottom and you put it up on your countertop and pure honey just flows right out of the bottom. It's pretty awesome. It's beautiful and tastes delicious.

The good thing about the extractor too is all you're doing is carving off the top wax cap, but you're leaving the wax part of the chamber, the bulk of the wax intact so that the bees can reuse it and they have to eat less honey to produce more wax for the next season. It's pretty great. It is pretty great.

That's beekeeping, which is pretty great too. Agreed. You got anything else right now? I got nothing else. Well, we'll talk about this more later when we get into beekeeping as old men, okay? Yeah, for sure. Not that you have to be an old man to be into beekeeping.

That's not at all what I mean. No. If you want to know more about beekeeping, go on to HowStuffWorks and check out this awesome article by Dave Ruse and there's also tons of other stuff around the internet to help you. And since I said tons of other stuff on the internet, that means it's time for a listener mail.

I'm going to call this something about our jingle, our theme song. Hey guys, been listening for about eight years. Never had a reason to write in. Now you get a lot of emails from couples who sing your jingle back and forth to each other. Which is very cute, but my story is less cute. I just moved into a new house and it turns out

we have the exact amount of steps on our stairs for me to stomp to your jingle. Oh yes. Ever since I discovered this a couple of months ago, it's become virtually impossible for me to not stomp your jingle on the stairs, sometimes singing along too. I can't imagine how madding that is.

A couple of days ago, I was thirsty in the middle of the night and went downstairs for some water. I'm sure you can guess what happened next. Down I go, into my front door, chipping a tooth. I was not guessing that that was going to happen. I wasn't going to guess that either. But Jamie, I'm very sorry that happened. Seriously?

Jamie is from Siena College. And I'm sorry, it's the worst of all earworms. Right, but that was the email. It just kind of ended like that. Yeah, I mean. It was like I wanted it to be like, I went to the dentist and the dentist happened to turn out to be a long lost uncle

who put me in his will or something. But no, it ended with the chipping of the tooth. That's it. Sorry Jamie, that's all we can say. It ended like many of my own stories. If you want to get in touch with us like Jamie did, to let us know you chipped a tooth or just to say hi, or that an uncle put you in their will,

you can go on to stuffyoushouldknow.com and check out our social links there. You can send us a good old fashioned email. Wrap it up, slather it on the behind with honey, and send it off to StuffPodcast at iHeartRadio.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,

visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass

on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.